Friday, May 23, 2008

Gone but not forgotten

recommendations of books we love but might have forgotten over the years. I have asked several people to help me by also remembering a favorite book. . . . I'm worried great books of the recent past are sliding out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we all can name, but the books that come next

Book recommendations? I am always so full of 'em that I hardly know what to say!

The older novel that I am constantly recommending (it is my favorite novel of all time) is Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows. But I am thinking for today that we want the great books of the more recent past. I am not sure I am really doing anything very complimentary by singling out people's books as slightly forgotten! Novels that received some considerable attention, then, but that deserve to remain front-and-center in the readerly imagination: Stephen Elliott's Happy Baby; Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name; Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai. Jo Walton's Farthing books also, and Charlie Williams' Deadfolk and sequels...

Some great recommendations there. And I wouldn't worry about insulting an author by suggesting that his or her book isn't as well known as it ought to be. I haven't met one yet who thought his or her work WAS as well known as it ought to be.

Anyway, Mickey Mouse. Wow. Was just round with the mouse ears, or was it Mickey's whole outline, with the big gloves and shoes?

About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.